The DSK Lesson

How did we miss the clues that told a different story?

By

Bret Stephens

July 5, 2011

Almost from the beginning, there was something amiss in the case of People v. Dominique Strauss-Kahn. This was the very specific way in which the managing director of the International Monetary Fund was alleged to have forced himself upon a maid in his pricey Times Square Sofitel suite. More than a few people must have pondered the one-word question—really?—that might have cut short the prosecution's case before it got rolling.

Then again, who would have dared ask this in print or on air? And who really wanted to, anyway?

Columnist Bret Stephens on the DSK denouement.

Let me confess: I was pretty much delighted by the way L'Affaire DSK seemed to be playing out. When the news broke last Thursday that the case against Mr. Strauss-Kahn was falling apart—that his accuser was a serial liar, a prostitute according to the New York Post, with a $100,000 bank account and ambitions (caught on tape) to turn her supposed tragedy into a get-rich-quick scheme—my immediate reaction was: how disappointing.

Not that I ever took any joy in the thought that a presumably vulnerable woman had apparently been raped by a man with a reputation for promiscuous and predatory appetites.

But I did enjoy the thought of this mandarin of the tax-exemptocracy being pulled from the comfort of his first-class Air France seat and dispatched to Riker's Island without regard to status or dignity. And I admired the humble immigrant who would risk so much for the sake of justice. And I smiled at the spectacle of France's Socialists finding their would-be savior exposed by American prosecutors when they had been hypocritically observing a code of silence about his habits. And I liked seeing the IMF red-faced for whitewashing DSK's previous escapades.

I doubt I was alone in feeling this: People generally, and columnists especially, want news that has the qualities of a parable—the surprise that turns out to be no surprise at all. With a story like DSK's, the temptation of a tidy moral tends to overwhelm whatever doubts might be cast upon it by a countervailing point of data.

Still, the fact that I and so many others wanted this story to be true was only half the problem. There are, also, the habits of mind that seem to have prevented prosecutors and journalists alike from quickly following the threads of what ought to have been a common-sense suspicion.

ENLARGE

Dominique Strauss-Kahn
AFP/Getty Images

Blame it on old-fashioned discomfort, so out-of-step in our culture of sexual hyper-frankness, when it comes to discussing the nature and details of an alleged rape. Or blame it on political correctness that rarely accords alleged rapists the usual presumption of innocence and had, in a working single-mother African immigrant, a near-perfect caricature of the perfect victim. Or blame it on the idea that, since Mr. Strauss-Kahn is well-known as a philandering rogue, he must perforce also be a brute. Or blame it on the political calculations of a Manhattan district attorney with a less-than-sure touch who might well have been reluctant, when it came to the question of whether to rush DSK's case to a grand jury, to be seen siding with the powerful against the powerless.

Blame it on all of the above. In the case of People v. Dominque Strauss-Kahn, each of us—inveterate Francophobes, knee-jerk victimologists and so on—had a reason to idle our brain.

So this is as good an opportunity as any to ask where else we might be committing similar blunders. The climate change obsession, with its Manichean concept of polluting corporations versus noble eco-warriors? The Wall Street obsession, with its belief the boardroom boys were criminally guilty of the financial crisis? The China obsession, with its view that the Middle Kingdom is destined to overtake the U.S. in global economic and political clout? The Israel obsession, with its notion that if only Jewish settlements were removed from the West Bank peace would break out throughout the Middle East?

In each of these cases, the media (broadly speaking) has too often been guilty of looking only for the evidence that fits a pre-existing story line. It doesn't help that in journalism you can usually find the story you're looking for, whether it's record-breaking heat in some corner of the world, or malicious Israeli settlers making life miserable for their Palestinian neighbors, or evidence of financial chicanery in Manhattan, or of economic prowess in Shanghai.

But anecdotes are not data—which happens to be the world's most easily neglected truism. Also true is that sloppy moral categories like the powerful and the powerless, or the selfish and the altruistic, are often misleading and susceptible to manipulation. And the journalists who most deserve to earn their keep are those who understand that the line of any story is likely to be crooked.

Which brings me back to DSK. Whatever his future brings—let's hope it's not the presidency of France—it's hard to escape the conclusion that he's a sleaze. But not every sleazy character is a criminal, a fine distinction of the sort that might keep us from going astray on stories that, unlike this one, really do matter.

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